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The radiocarbon dating programmes of the National Museums Scotland

Abstract

Alison Sheridan 2002 The radiocarbon dating programmes of The National Museums of Scotland Antiquity 76 (293) http://repository.nms.ac.uk/457 Deposited on: 21 April 2011 NMS Repository – Research publications by staff of the National Museums Scotland http://repository.nms.ac.uk/ SPECIAL SECTION 794 The radiocarbon dating programmes of The National Museums of Scotland ALISON SHERIDAN" Since 1991, the Archaeology Department of the National Museums of Scotland (NMS) has been undertaking programmes of AMS radiocarbon dating of organic items in its collections, par- ticularly wetland finds. This work was initially stimulated by the success of Caroline Earwood's research on dating bog butter containers and other wooden vessels from the National col- lections (Earwood 1990; 1993a; 1993b; 1997), which demonstrated among other things that the practice of bog butter deposition in Scot- land extended at least as far back as the early centuries AD. Preparations for the Museum of Scotland (which opened in 19Y8) involved the commis- sioning of numerous dates for our display items; and since then, the project has continued and diversified, latterly with the assistance of spon- sorship from the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) and the Society of Antiquar- ies of Scotland (SAS). The latest development has been the initiation of a nationwide pro- gramme of dating cremated human bone, tak- ing advantage of the recently developed technique at the University of Groningen (Aerts et al. 2001; Lanting I(r Brindley 1998; Lanting et al. in press). For this programme, part-fund- ing by SAS has allowed us to date bones from non-NMS collections as well as NMS specimens. In addition to these NMS-initiated programmes, there have been other dating projects featuring NMS material, such as Tolan-Smith and Bonsall's NERC-sponsored Bone Artefact Dat- ing Programme, tar

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